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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

The law of large numbers (of customers) says you cant help but make at least some money - your valuation is determined by how well you monetize the tidal wave of growth. Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

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How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

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Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

If you havent seen it, Pascals recent presentation on continuous deployment is a must-see; slides are here. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

Scalable systems are no exception - if your assumptions about how many customers youll have, or how they will behave are just a little bit wrong, you can wind up with a massive amount of wasted code. You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth."